Fallon
Chapter forty-two
The Queen of Nothing
The wind kicks up as I cross the yard toward Mom’s house, the distance between my car and her front porch feeling endless. Every step drags against years of instinct telling me to turn around.
Showing emotion around my mother has always been dangerous. Weakness to her isn’t something to comfort—it’s something to exploit. One crack in my armor, one shaky breath, and she’ll pry it open just to remind me how unforgiving the world is supposed to be.
So I learned young how to keep myself sealed shut. Careful. Controlled. Because if you give Rosemary Lawson even the smallest opening, she’ll tear right through you.
To date, I’ve found very little that hurts or cuts as deep as my mother’s words.
Leaves flap wildly on the branches. The whoosh of hot air picks up a rickety yellow yard chair, sending it skittering across the overgrown grass.
Well, if that isn’t the universe giving me a metaphorical slap in the face. It carries the chair while pushing me forward—toward her.
“Well, look what the cat finally dragged back in.”
She’s perched in her broken rocking chair, looking every bit the scorned woman my nightmares depict her to be. Cigarette in one hand. Bottle in the other. She’s consistent. I’ll give her that.
She’s such a treat.
“Storm’s coming in fast.”
The bag hits the porch with a thump as I drop it between us. The wind whips, a tangible force against skin. Its howl, a rising crescendo that battles the booming thunder and blinding flashes of lightning.
Still, she sits in her rocker, unmoved.
“I brought provisions. Batteries. Canned goods. The usual. It’s the last you’ll ever receive from me.” Her dark eyes, so different from my own, scrutinize me. No warmth. No smile—strictly cold, bitter indifference lingers as she regards me.
“With that snide look on your face, I take it you’re screwing Cyrus McCoy again.”
The crude statement lands like a blow. Her malicious grin spreads as my body betrays me.
That’s the point, though, isn’t it? To bring me to heel, drag my dreams down, extinguish my hope.
That’s who she is: a dream killer. My anguish is suffocating; the devastating truth that has always been there between us.
She will never change, and I will always be desperate for her to. Life will never be enough for her.
“My love life is none of your business.”
She scoffs. Two glazed eyes lock on me with reckless intensity. She’s drunk. Of course, she is.
“Is a good bedding all it takes for you to lose your wits?”
Her disappointment doesn’t faze me. This is textbook behavior from her: question, degrade, gaslight, make me believe I’m the one who’s flawed.
“Look who the new whore in town is now.”
“That’s not appropriate, and you know it.
Shock value stops working when people start expecting it.
” Over the years, she’s evoked strong emotions from me: anger, pity, heartbreak.
Years of disenchantment strung together like old Christmas light strands, with each passing year, my own hope, distinguished one by one.
The last, snuffed out by her decision to wreck my child so thoroughly, like she’s wrecked me.
I turn to leave, noting the state of the yard-junk scattered, lawn chairs overturned, grass knee-high. I sigh. You can’t fix what’s not perceived as broken.
“How did that bastard child of yours react to Daddy’s great return? Is it as good for her as it is for you?”
I shatter irrevocably. My steps are nearly silent as I close the distance again. Her smug face. Her condemning tone. Heart-shattering words. For once, I drop my mask.
The rage.
The disappointment.
The resolve.
“One thing I’ve learned over the years—being lucky enough to raise a little girl who carries so much of me inside her—is that loving me was never the problem, Mom.”
My throat tightens around the confession, grief bleeding through the words no matter how hard I try to hold it back.
“Because I would die a million times, in a million different ways, before I’d ever let my daughter spend a single day questioning whether I love her with everything I have.”
Her scoff would’ve gutted me once. Not today.
Today, I finally see her for what she is—a woman so consumed by her own damage that she burned everyone close enough to love her. Including me.
And no matter how this story ends, my mother will always be the villain in it.
“So dramatic—” she begins.
I cut her off quickly. “What did you do?” I ask quietly.
“Nothing that didn’t benefit you better, I assure you.”
“What did you say to Cyrus? That summer, to make him leave?”
She lights another cigarette, drags long and slow. Waiting me out. That’s her favorite game. Unraveling my composure. This time, it won’t happen. I wait her out. Each moment more agonizing. Her chair creaks as she stops rocking, her body shifting toward me.
“I did you a favor, girl.”
“What did you do?”
She flicks ashes in my direction, the wind whipping them away.
“You two were never going to last. Cyrus had one foot out the door already.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make!”
“Well, someone had to make the tough decisions. You were too busy getting knocked up to make the right ones!” Her eyes widen as she realizes what she’s allowed to slip up.
She knew I was pregnant. Not weeks after he left, but before he left. And she did it anyway. She’s not a mother. She’s a monster. I straighten; everything I’ve ever bottled-up slamming back into place like a vault door.
This is the moment I stop fighting for her, for us.
There’s no coming back from this. No more olive branches extended just to watch her set them on fire. No more excuses dressed up as grace.
She does not get another chance at my child. Not after this. Not after building her entire life on manipulation, selfishness, and the kind of hunger that devours everyone around it without remorse. She turned people into stepping stones. Turned love into leverage.
I won’t let my daughter become another piece in her game.
“You’re right,” I say, voice calm but shaking.
“I was too busy getting pregnant with the greatest gift I’ve ever been given.
” She scoffs. I continue. “My past is just that, my past. As you are now, a part of that past, too.” She opens her mouth, but I hold my hand up, cutting her off before she can take a single opportunity to slice through my heart again.
“You will not contact me. You will not refer to my child or me in any capacity to anyone, ever again. Because…we are not family. Not anymore. Those days are over. As is our relationship. You will support yourself from now on. I’m done.”
No tears fall from her face. No remorse flickers behind her brittle eyes.
She is a hollow shell; I no longer care to love her.
“I could never have loved you, you with those green eyes and bright red hair. Every time I look at you, that bastard is staring back at me.” And, there it is.
Cold and malicious, my mother could never stand losing, and she had lost to my father.
Somehow, it made so much sense that the pain of knowing doesn’t sting as much as I thought it would.
There’s nothing else to say. I turn, walking away.
I don’t cry until I’ve driven down the overgrown one-lane road toward the highway. The rain pelts the windshield, mirroring the tears I can no longer hold back.
I cry for the little girl who never knew a mother’s love.
I cry for the daughter who never will.
I cry for my child who lost her father before knowing him.
I cry for Cyrus. Who never stopped loving me.
And I cry for the broken shell of a woman behind me who so meticulously deconstructed that broken part of her, that isolated, bitter loneliness is all she will ever know. I pull over to the curb on the side of the road. Once, she was a child. A child whom no one protected or loved.
The one no one saved.
The one who didn’t survive.
The once sweet girl was snuffed out.
These are the last tears I will give her, because even though she has gone through a tremendous amount of pain. She has also caused a tremendous amount of pain.